A sign placed out on the 16th Street Mall beckoned people in late March 2014 to sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care and Connect for Health Colorado. (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

Brokers and agents in the field continue to report serious problems with online enrollment at Connect for Health Colorado, the state health insurance exchange established under the Affordable Care Act.

Connect for Health officials report they enrolled about 12,600 people in health and dental insurance Monday, Dec. 15 — “more than any single day ever before on the marketplace,” an exchange spokesman said.

“We recognize our systems were challenged at multiple points by a late rush,” exchange spokesman Luke Clarke said. “While we regret the inconvenience and justified frustration experienced by many customers and broker partners, the number of successful enrollments in new and renewed coverage far outnumber the difficulties.”

Connect for Health officials told The Denver Post they can’t readily track how many people are having problems with the enrollment system, yet some brokers dispute this.

The exchange issues tickets to callers when they can’t fix their problems on the spot. The “trouble tickets,” as brokers call them, start with the date and end with a sequence number, such as 141215-001234. Brokers assume the tickets are issued sequentially — in simple numerical order.

One broker received a a sequence number just under 9000 on Monday, Dec. 15, the deadline for enrolling for coverage effective Jan. 1. On preceding days, the numbers were running in the 3000-4000 range. Connect for Health officials say it is a wrong assumption that 3,000 to 4,000 enrollees were experiencing problems those days, in part because a person who calls more than once will generate multiple ticket numbers.

“Every call received is logged with an incident or tracking number,” Clarke said. “When we send an automated email response, they get numbers. And we may create multiple numbers for a single issue because the same person contacts us more than once.”

“That’s just for people who had the patience to wait on hold for most of an hour,” said ACA-certified broker Mike Eubanks, co-owner of Rosita Risk Management LLC in Colorado Springs.

The high volumes create longer waits, Clarke said.

Clarke said the exchange can quantify unresolved account problems by running a special report. “We don’t have the time to do that immediately while helping customers,” Clarke said.

“That said, we have received many reports of technical problems,” he said. “The majority have been forgotten passwords and locked accounts.”

Since Nov. 10, the technical problems officials have seen involve the financial application process for tax credits or Medicaid. The process has confused users into starting over and thus making multiple applications. Some users also are seeing a “500” (server) error message at some point in the process, Clarke said. And people have reported errors the exchange can’t duplicate in its own testing.

“We remain committed to completing January enrollments for anyone who initiated the process before Dec. 15 — whether they are working on their application alone or with assistance,” Clarke said in a statement Tuesday.

Eubanks, who said he also has been a website developer for a long time, doesn’t find the Connect for Health site even minimally user-friendly.

“We experienced lockups or crashes at more than 10 different points in their systems,” Eubanks said of the merged Connect for Health and Medicaid enrollment portal.

Electa Draper is the health writer for The Denver Post and has covered every news beat in a 22-year journalism career at three newspapers. She has a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's in journalism.